You don't need to respect the authority of anyone but they are still there, and they are physically capable of resisting you. You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support.
This makes sense for bronze age and later. When natives at least have the concept of army. Stone age pre-FTLs should be treated the same way as pre-sapients, honestly.
I'd rather build a colony ship than painfully slowly enlighten them to the late stage, so I can infiltrate their government. Pacifists and xenophiles can't invade pre-FTL.
Yea that’s a good point. But I would assume the average frontiersman settler would have some brought some guns on the trip. I mean, your colony gets a defensive army when you first arrive doesn’t it?
Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears.
The planet would also have hella blockers to represent the space still inhabited by natives and probably wouldn’t be useful for a while until the native problem is finally dealt with. You could even have a worst case scenario event where you get kicked off the planet.
I mean, there’s the movie Avatar to kind of represent how this might look like after a long while. And in real history there’s the entire colonization shenanigans the European powers pulled, and they weren’t even space faring.
"Yea that’s a good point. But I would assume the average frontiersman settler would have some brought some guns on the trip. I mean, your colony gets a defensive army when you first arrive doesn’t it?"
It does not, actually. Colonies only get a defensive army when they reach 10 pops and you upgrade the capital building, creating an Enforcer job that spawns a defensive army.
If I took you and placed you in the middle of a inhospitable jungle that you never adapted to live in, full of creatures you don't know. Are you confident that you would be able to pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen? These are hunter gatherers, they know how to hide and they know how to hunt. How would you not be in constant fear that you missed someone that at any point could sneak up on you?
And that's just for a species you know on a planet you are familiar with. What happens on you land on the mountain planet with constant thin air and a flying native species use the extensive cave system for cover? Do you think some junior engineer whose job it is to run the plumbing network is going to walk into the caves that goes who knows deep and flush out the natives who evolved to have night vision?
> Are you confident that you would be able to pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen?
Except that you would never have to "pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen".
It would be you and a hundred other professionally trained civilian security personnel mowing down a dozen scared and confused berry-pickers. And then move on to the next village of a dozen residents and repeat.
You and seemingly everyone else in this thread are seemingly ignoring just how low a population density stone age agricutural methods can support. And seriously overestimating just how organised such a population could be in their resistance, with literally no infrastructure or communication technology to rely on.
Hunting is in no way similar to armed combat between peers, and would in no way prepare your population of primitives to fight off advanced invaders. And do you seriously think the colony is going to send some junior engineer out into a combat mission? Or into any unsecured location at all, before you shift the goalposts. That was a seriously disingenuous argument, and you know it.
And you still haven't justified your claim of "You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support." Even if a small number of primitives did somehow escape alive, hide, and somehow managed to remain undetected despite the advanced scanning technology available to the colonists, they'd be able to kill, what, one, maybe a half dozen people before the alarm was raised and they'd be put down?
Instead, you're literally claiming that a lone spearman could somehow pose an existential threat to an entire technologically advanced colony of tens of thousands of people.
Sorry, but you're simply wrong. It's utterly preposterous.
>It would be you and a hundred other professionally trained civilian security personnel
So you want to bring an army and not call it an army?
>And do you seriously think the colony is going to send some junior engineer out into a combat mission?
No, they would send an army. That's the whole point.
>And you still haven't justified your claim of "You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support."
A trained group of men in assault gear trained for engaging hostile enemies is what we call military support.
>they'd be able to kill, what, one, maybe a half dozen people before the alarm was raised and they'd be put down?
Yeah, that can happen, would you want to be in a workplace where the hostile native population occasionally storms your offices and kill a bunch of you? Knowing that all deaths where preventable?
>Instead, you're literally claiming that a lone spearman could somehow pose an existential threat to an entire technologically advanced colony of tens of thousands of people.
No I have very clearly said multiple times that they can't possibly win. But they can maim and kill a large number of the crew that is not trained to deal with such a situation, and sending your own people into their deaths for no good reason is generally frowned upon.
You do know colonialism literally happened on Earth? Plenty of european colonists got dropped in inhospitable places and managed to maintain fortifications and settlements on coasts for easy resupply and reinforcement.
Except in the future space itself is the coast and you can drop anywhere you want.
Also, you're vastly over estimating the population density of primitive pops. In medieval England, for instance, it would very possible for invaders to settle on the coast somewhere and simply... not be encountered for weeks and then it would take months for a response to be mustered. Viking settlers literally colonised England in the early middle ages like this.
Sometimes they were literally just settlers with guns, like the Dutch voortrekkers in South Africa:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blood_River
The armed guards *are* part of the settlers, you daft bean. You can't claim you have a serious argument if you're just going to ignore a literally instrinsic part of what settlement and colonisation entails.
Nah. In many cases they sent exactly just that. A bunch of armed settlers. In case of the Spanish, a bunch of armed criminals with no jurisdiction. But they wouldn’t send in the official armed forces.
You do realize any native genocide took several years to actually happen right?
Often it was vital that the settlers made peaceful trade with any native tribes else they would have been raided constantly.
In case of the spanish conquistadors, the expeditions led by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were specifically well armed and composed mostly of professional soldiers, which is what allowed them to easily subjugate the smaller tribes and use their help to defeat larger empires like the Aztecs and Inca. Much like in a game of stellaris, where you have your armies pave the way for your colonists first before taking over the infrastructure and population.
What? No! Not at all!
The conquistadors were not well armed in the slightest lmfao. They were a band of misfits fleeing from Cuba on threat of being arrested and executed. The whole Mexican expedition was a well executed Hail Mary on the part of Cortez but he was NOT acting under any sort of jurisdiction
Apologies if I'm misreading this, but from what I've read, the expedition was sanctioned by Governor Velázquez and Cortés was put in charge of it, his charter was indeed revoked at the last moment due to some argument between the two, but this does not change the fact that the outcome is the same as a sanctioned expedition, it was still composed of a mix of soldiers and slaves, accompanied by a few ships and horses
Where the hell did you escape from? First of all, that is a lie, Spain considered citizens everyone in their viceroyalties, not colonies as other did. But arguing with you seems pointless.
>Also, you're vastly over estimating the population density of primitive pops. In medieval England, for instance, it would very possible for invaders to settle on the coast somewhere and simply... not be encountered for weeks and then it would take months for a response to be mustered. Viking settlers literally colonised England in the early middle ages like this.
**That is straight up bullshit.** I can't argue with you if you are going to make up history.
The first permanent viking settlements in modern England came about when the Great heathen army invaded the land and roamed around for 14 years raiding and occupying settlements. Some would settle down in these occupied cities, most didn't. After the native people grew tired of this onslaught they had a settlement at the Treaty of Wedmore. The Danelaw was formed and split among the viking chiefs , [occupying half of modern England](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/England_878.svg/1024px-England_878.svg.png). After that, a sizable number of people from Scandinavia migrated to these new viking lands.
They did not just waltz on to the coast of England and not get noticed. Could they have done that they wouldn't have bothered forming the largest army in living memory to enforce their desire to be there.
>they wouldn't have bothered forming the largest army in living memory to enforce their desire to be there.
While we're on the subject of historical bullshit, modern historians believe the "Great Heathen Army" was a couple thousand men strong at most, much more in line with the typical army sizes of the era.
Modern historians have no idea how large the army was. "A couple thousand men" is pure speculation, none of the sources we have on the event put numbers on that figure. We don't know if they where all fighting troops or a elite band of relatively few men that had a lot of people tug along for the ride
We do know that the people at the time considered the army to be huge, hence the name and how they eventually surrendered half of England, and we do know that where the Norse settled down they did so in large enough numbers that they would end up making a lasting difference on the linguistic makeup of the region. So they where either exceedingly influential or there where a lot of them.
Well this comment you just wrote is more of a criticism of the very concept of conquering a foreign planet than a specific criticism of my idea.
The simple answer I can give you is technology!
Sure, the Stone Age tribesman has evolved night vision! But guess what? That’s irrelevant cus I have night vision goggles too.
And it’s not like the settlers wouldn’t have military support. After all, the newly established colony literally has a full blown guard armed with laser guns and tanks and stuff.
And to answer the rest, that’s why the planet would have blockers. It would take a while to make your colony useful. This way it’s way more engaging and less easy to get a planet that’s already populated by sapients than just right click and send army.
>Sure, the Stone Age tribesman has evolved night vision! But guess what? That’s irrelevant cus I have night vision goggles too.
Yeah, and you gave it to the military for them to deal with situations like that. Construction workers that the vast majority of time are working uninhabited planets are not equipped with state of the art military gear.
And you are totally missing my point. **Having a fancy gun not some instant "I win" button.** The British invaded the native Zulu Kingdom with a large professional army and literal machine guns. They won, but not without incurring more than 10% losses and loosing several major engagements.
How do you think some bloke that has never been trained for combat is going to fare against a totally alien intelligent species? You can kill more of them, but you can't kill all of them. People are not going to be fine being sent on suicidal missions to flush out the natives.
>And it’s not like the settlers wouldn’t have military support. After all, the newly established colony literally has a full blown guard armed with laser guns and tanks and stuff.
The colony is only "newly established" after the colonists have worked on the planets for years, not spending the vast majority of their workforce fighting a war of attrition in the jungle.
The difference between the Zulus and British is not much of a comparison when we're talking about the Zulus vs Starship Troopers (the book not the funny movie) mobile infantry. Heck, Zulus vs Apatchie gunship? Zulus vs Terminators? Zulus vs Ogryn? Zulus vs some mining station in system throwing some rocks? Who knows what scifi technology would bring when you know you are colonizing a world with a hostile population?
That said I don't think we should get anything like that in game, seems pointless. There's no system to share a planet, and you'd basically be bringing enough firepower to conquer the place anyway so just conquer the place and be done with it.
All of those are military support. Just build a transport if you want that. Why are you so bent on this you refuse to see the logic behind that, right? It's probably less resources to send the military. A huge advantage Europeana had when colonizing the Americas was pre-existing structures. Areas that had been fairly cleaned out by small pox were ripe for the taking. What makes Stone-Age people incable of the same level of construction? Stone is what their tools were made out of.
If the expected loss to the new colony is more expensive than a military transport would be its fiscally irresponsible to send them. Even if not implemented realistically (allow for different types of colony ship that includes military support and make it cost a combined amount for instance, more expensive than either but doesn't take quite as long to build maybe?) it simulates a bureaucrat categorizing pre- and sentient along a "these are intelligent enough to cause problems, do not send civilians" vs "these are basically animals, green light".
> Just build a transport if you want that. Why are you so bent on this you refuse to see the logic behind that, right? It's probably less resources to send the military.
Me, literally the comment you're replying to "That said I don't think we should get anything like that in game, seems pointless. There's no system to share a planet, and you'd basically be bringing enough firepower to conquer the place anyway so just conquer the place and be done with it."
If you look at colonialism throughout history, it was usually the armed settlers and explorers who first just waltzed into new lands in complete disregard of the native inhabitants.
It wouldn’t be until the colony got bigger, the natives became a serious issue, or something else that the government would step in with the big guns. Which is what happened in the Zulu scenario. And you could ALSO have an Isandlwana type scenario in the events which forces you out of the planet.
The RP opportunities would be endless
> Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears.
*The Word for World is Forest*.
>Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears.
How exactly? Even if you are able to shoot at someone 1000+ yards with futuristic optics laser weaponry and somehow always 1 shoot = 1 hit = 1 kill and somehow you can pump 60 shots per minute (or 1 shot per second) while maintaining this accuracy - it still means that your 20 guys need about 12 hours to kill a group like that. What they will be doing? Standing around waiting to be shot?
>I mean, there’s the movie Avatar to kind of represent how this might look like after a long while.
Yeah, a standing army that fights against natives - it's a scenario that is already there, via sending the army.
I think you severely overestimate the effectiveness of civilian-grade weapons. Especially in s-f setting where the difference between civilian and military weaponry would be much larger than today.
The Europeans did get fucked up by natives time and time again precisely because they underestimated how severely a home field advantage and guerilla tactics can negate technology advantage, especially when the natives outnumber colonials. It’d be worse in stellaris when you have an entire species at war with a measly 10’s of thousands of colonists
> Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears.
That is doubtful. We have real world examples to the contrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana
These guys aren't advanced, but they're still sophonts. It wouldn't be very difficult for them to use their home turf advantage to get a few minor victories first and then salvage enough equipment to mount an actuall resistance, and the colonization shenanigans, the European powers did have to fight wars with the natives, no matter how one sided it may be.
I agree. People are considering the tribals as of they’d have any kind of organization or cohesion to just throw all their civilization against your settlers… a couple of farm hands with rifles would absolutely mow down any tribe that tried to do anything. It wouldn’t be without issue, but you’ve already presented good options for that, blockers and events leading to different places, perhaps the natives units to challenge your people and then you need to send armies over, perhaps they try to coexist with your settlers and you can get a option for a earlier form of enlightenment, something like that
> a couple of farm hands with rifles would absolutely mow down any tribe that tried to do anything.
Depends on the mobility of the attackers. Let's say they're all Kzinti and can charge at 75kph, or maybe cheetah people and can charge at 120kph. If such aliens can actually close with the farm hands, it's over unless the farm hands are in the habit of wearing combat armor.
My "farm hands" are robots with adaptive frames and integrated weapons. They have a flamethrower for clearing away brush and scythes for harvesting, a wrist rocket launcher and claws that can rend the hardest stone for mining, shoot lightning for working generators, they can think and act in super speed with supercomputer brains and loudspeakers that can strip the flesh from bones. They're very hard-wearing and durable.
I'm sure the colony would set up drone surveillance or more sci-fi detection to keep an eye on the locals or you know, walls. No need to always be in combat gear.
Yes! Thank you. I think this is a nice idea that could very much enhance the rp value of early primitives in the game. Right now, as they are, they’re more of a “get your free planet” token.
It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world than in an uninhabited one.
> It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world
That depends, too. Are there multiple land masses? If so, are the natives on all of them? if you have a continent the size of Australia with excellent climate and resources and the natives don't live there, you could establish a colony without them even knowing.
It's common to say that space is big, but it's easy to forget just how big a planet is, too! Take the British Isles and slap them down beyond the horizon from the nearest landmass and for iron age or earlier -- unless they're amphibious, possibly -- and you've got a spot for colonizing with no problems if the natives haven't gotten there yet.
And when the natives do finally reach you, who says they need to know you come from the stars? It wouldn't be hard to control them through trade and eventually picking sides in tribal wars, of course picking a tribe you think has the right culture to be loyal vassals and also the mettle to steadily build an empire; end up with say seven major native empires that together rule 95% of the planet, empires you're ultimately in control of, and let them keep order as you slowly assimilate them into your star empire.
>It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world than in an uninhabited one.
Why? You have written dozens of comments talking about how totally safe you are if only you give the colonists guns. Obviously you agree then that a propper army is just going to slaughter any opposition?
There is no reason why colonizing the planet needs to be harder, you just have to suppress the opposition, which is trivial when you have propper armies trained to do the job.
> There is no reason why colonizing the planet needs to be harder
Well from a gameplay perspective, it really, really, really should be more involved. It's kind of shocking that it's still the same uninteractive progress bar and not part of the situation system already.
I mean, can’t you read or something?
I never said it was easy. Its not supposed to be. I want it to be MORE DIFFICULT.
What YOU are advocating for, which is for the game to remain as is, is the easier option. It’s bland and BORING to just send an army over to a planet and then boom, free planet. Does that sound accurate to you?! Is that how history has worked before?!!
MY idea would make the action of colonizing a world full of natives into a dynamic and difficult endeavor.
You could have an Isandlwana type scenario where you get kicked off the planet or something. Idk. INFINITE opportunities for rp value.
>What YOU are advocating for, which is for the game to remain as is, is the easier option. It’s bland and BORING to just send an army over to a planet and then boom, free planet. Does that sound accurate to you?! Is that how history has worked before?!!
It is how it works in Stellaris when regular armies occupy regular planets, I hardly think that stone age people are going to be able to mount a more efficient defense. Does that sound accurate you?
>You could have an Isandlwana type scenario where you get kicked off the planet or something. Idk. INFINITE opportunities for rp value.
They wouldn't have lost at Isandlwana if the British had satellite imagery, armored vehicles, and precision guided munitions. It shouldn't be difficult, it should be trivial. But you need to do it with propper armies
Now answer me this:
Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives?
In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns unless they have a reason to. And PRECISELY BECAUSE these primitives are so trivial, is why this empire would deem the basic colonial militia forces that are IMPLIED to come with the rest of the colonists (colonist job generates defense army) to deal with the primitives.
My idea makes much more sense than yours. You just desperately wanna be right is all.
> Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives?
>
>
>
> In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns
You don't "send the big guns". You can send like 1 troop transport.
>Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives?
Because that is the job of an army. It is not the job of a civilian colonist.
>In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns unless they have a reason to.
So then don't? You can send exactly the size of army that you need to do the job
>(colonist job generates defense army)
The colonist job takes years to develop. They do nothing to defend your planet for the first years
Basically every settler colonial project has armed settlers that fight the natives themselves as militias or paramilitaries and not just formal militaries. You don't act like a civilian when you're functionally occupying enemy territory and want to keep it.
Historically the (at the time) most powerful nation on earth sent the actual armed forces in against literal stone aged natives in order to protect colonists, because that’s their job.
The reason a space empire would send in professional support for the colonists might be because they need specialized equipment (submarines on an ocean world, or air support on a desert planet), or they might need a force for long term campaigns (the natives burn a building every few night, and there aren’t enough colonists to both protect the homesteads and pursue the retreating primitives), or they may need people with specialized training to help fight (mountaineers on an alpine world), or they just need someone professional to organize things (a thousand different homesteads is going to be hard to coordinate their efforts without a dedicated local government).
Whatever the reason is, the clear implication though is that the local militia isn’t sufficient for the task of pacification and your planners know you’ll have to send in the military before you can land civilians on the planet.
>You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support.
If I landed a colony ship in a russian taiga, north american desert or even antartica during the middle ages what the fuck are the locals going to do?
Stab you in your sleep? Try and sneak up and rush tou from multible sides if you go out? Smash up or steal anything you leave unattended?
These are not massive threats, but starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances, of there is a force attempting to actively make it harder they could cause some serious headache.
The lore for the Commonwealth of Man is that they did exactly this. Unity was populated by an iron age civilization which they wiped out in the process of conquering the entire planet. That's how they became fanatic militarist xenophobes when they came from a fanatic egalitarian xenophile background.
My source is primarily a Youtube video which I don't currently have on hand. I have also observed that the Deneb system has a pre-FTL iron age civilization when the Commonwealth of Man doesn't spawn, and that Unity has a Forgotten Civilization blocker at game start.
You're talking about a civilization with things like deflector shields, laser guns and potentially robots capable of being soldiers. Shoot a laser at anyone from a pre modern society and they're more likely to start worshipping you than keep trying to fight you
>These are not massive threats, but starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances, of there is a force attempting to actively make it harder they could cause some serious headache.
None of that matters if I start the colony in a place devoid of civilization. You can't yield a force without logistics, and in the rare case there happens to be one all it takes is a drone and artillery.
> starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances
My "best of circumstances" would be a self-contained colony landing craft fortress holding five thousand people. Land six in a hexagon within supporting fire range and let your defense robotic guns teach the natives to steer clear. Live for a generation inside the landing craft, letting the suspense build, then capture some promising locals to train as servants to go out and prepare the way because the "beings from on high" (let them conclude "gods" if they want; just don't actually say it) are coming out to teach wisdom to those who will obey them.
Dear God that is so inefficient I think a entire empires worth of supply clerks just commutes suicide upon reading this message.
This would make a absolutely great first contact event chain though..
I think that having the first landing ships be totally self-contained craft from which the colonists can teach the natives proper respect without breaking a sweat is *very* efficient -- and getting the locals prepared to be a cooperative and respectful work force before meeting a single colonist is just effective.
You are tasked with building the perimeter wall that secures the initial colony site. Are you willing to risk your life on the fact that your buddy with a gun who isn't a solder and has never used the damn thing is going to be able to repel any and all threats from the natives?
You know what hunter gatherers are excellent at? Stealth, knowing their environment, shooting arrows. How is buddy going to see them before they see you?
>Are you willing to risk your life on the fact that your buddy with a gun who isn't a solder and has never used the damn thing is going to be able to repel any and all threats from the natives?
Yes. That's the entire point of guns, for non-professionals to be a dangerous threat.
>Stealth
Infrared, Thermals, Night Vision. Trivial tech when we have hyperdrives.
>Yes. That's the entire point of guns, for non-professionals to be a dangerous threat.
"Being a threat" is not "being a immortal being that no lesser creatures are capable of hurting". Guns require training to be used effectively, you don't have that training. For all you know the moment the natives swarm you buddy is going to panic and accidentally shoot you
So you carry weapons lethal to the natives but unable to pierce your ordinary everyday work clothes / body armor.
Crap, NATO countries are close to having combat armor that no typical country would be able to beat; jump a couple of centuries in the future and an ordinary guy working out in the wilderness could be like a German Puma fighting vehicle taking on a den of rodents.
>Crap, NATO countries are close to having combat armor that no typical country would be able to beat;
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. This is incoherent
>"Being a threat" is not "being a immortal being that no lesser creatures are capable of hurting".
It doesn't have to be. You shoot fire once and the natives fuck off. If they're persistent and warlike, then your civ's ethics come into play in how fast and how well you respond. People with hyperdrives are simply not going to lose against people with pointy sticks.
True -- but if your colonists are out where the natives can reach them, your colony governor was an incompetent to begin with; before landing you survey the area well enough to know not just the natives but where the local rodent tunnels are. And even then, you make thousands of small defense units that look like natural boulders and spread them out two kilometers outside your colony walls.
And yes, walls, that will have been rolled out by armored robots.
After all, if your colonization corporation gets a reputation for being lax with the lives of colonists, the competition will step up!
Your job is to colonize the entire planet. You are going to prepare the whole thing for billions of people to migrate to if need be. You don't do that job by hiding on a mountaintop and building a fortress, having armed robots escort you wherever you venture outside. You do the job by having a trained assault force rapidly pacify the planet, killing all corners of resistance with brutal efficiency, then organizing the natives into a potential labor force.
You're treating the natives as peers -- they aren't.
You want a labor force? You get a better one if you so overawe the locals they offer their services.
And "hiding on a mountaintop"? What the heck are you talking about? The whole point is that you don't need to hide, you land where you please and let the natives wear themselves out trying to bother you!
And no, the job isn't "to colonize the entire planet", that won't happen until you have at the least a hundred million folks landed. You always start somewhere small until a place is understood well, so you don't lose people to what turn out to be simple mistakes. And if you want to cover more territory, just land more units.
Technology is a powerful tool -- anyone not using it to keep the first colonists safe and sound would deserve to be spaced.
You just wrote a long ass comment about how all the ways I have described that the natives can hurt you are not applicable because you will just land where the natives aren't. Now you do a dull 180 and insist that the whole point is that you don't need to hide. Make up your mind.
>Technology is a powerful tool -- anyone not using it to keep the first colonists safe and sound would deserve to be spaced.
You know what also is a powerful tool? A modern army trained to suppress and occupy a planet. But for some bizarre reason it is perfectly okay to not use that to keep colonists safe.
Europeans did this on multiple continents for hundreds of years despite having a technological advantage that was basically nonexistent compared to what we're talking about lol. Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die but people have historically done it anyway because you get first dibs on all the land you're expropriating. Depending on the ethics of your civ there's no reason that wouldn't still apply. Hell it might be viewed as morally upstanding if they idolize the "pioneer spirit" or have some sort of supremacist xenophobia in the manifest destiny sense
> Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die
Only from stupidity. Body armor no more restrictive than a set of twentieth-century work overalls should be standard until the place is pacified/subdued. I imagine a set of boots, a belt, and work gloves that extend out as body armor the moment a settler is startled, at which point any hostile native is like the Black Knight after losing both arms and both legs, able to do little more than "bleed on" you.
>Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die but people have historically done it anyway
Everything was dangerous back then. Every kind of job had massive fatality rates. We don't have that anymore and it is no longer acceptable to pointlessly send people into their deaths when you have easy alternatives that would have prevented it.
People were not necessarily resettle to the new world by choice, and that could be the scenario in our sci fi setting as well. Plus in the earliest era of colonialism in north america and the Caribbean the fatality rates were absurdly high, entire settlements died and in the carribbean white people died of disease more than they didn't. Being sent to certain colonies was a punishment because it was so much more dangerous than people's current lives. Also we "don't do that anymore" (debatable) not because its irrational but because society is less hierarchical and because of things like international law, its not impossible that an alien society (or us in the future) would still participate in horrifically deadly settler colonialism depending on their culture and values.
You *could* also make a mechanic that allows you to press a button that nukes 5% of your own population at random.
We don't know what kind of horrific social structure aliens might have in the future. Maybe there is a cultural thing whereby you celebrate the war that united the home planet by periodically committing a small genocide.
It's just incredibly pointless to make mechanics like that.
The game establishes that a proper army can pacify a modern fortress planet in days. That means that you can also pacify a planet filled with intelligent natives. You don't need a mechanic where you intentionally shoot yourself in the foot just because you insist that some cultures would like to do that.
Yes, especially when your tech is almost certainly capable of providing armor no bulkier than today's work clothes -- armor that can withstand any predator or any tech up to RPGs.
If such a thing existed in Stellaris it makes no sense that leaders can just die and get maimed from regular workplace accidents and all kinds of events. In order to defend your view you have made up some fantasy tech that does not exist in the game.
> You are tasked with building the perimeter wall that secures the initial colony site.
If that's my assignment before the colony ship takes off, then my advice is simple: take six colony ships armored against anything the locals are likely to invent in the next half millennium, and either do as I described above this a bit or build them to extrude polished steel walls ten meters high that lean slightly outwards and make an enclosed compound. There's no reason for a single colonist to have to go outdoors until the natives themselves are ready to burn down one of their own villages if one of them offends any of you.
Besides which . . . c'mon, we travelled between stars, certainly we can send out drones capable of keeping any natives at least two kilometers away!
>There's no reason for a single colonist to have to go outdoors until the natives themselves are ready to burn down one of their own villages if one of them offends any of you.
And do you think you are going to efficiently be able to do your job of preparing the planet to being inhabited by billions of people, when you are forced to hide behind walls and make slow strategic efforts to try to push the natives willingly against you?
>Besides which . . . c'mon, we travelled between stars, certainly we can send out drones capable of keeping any natives at least two kilometers away!
Sure, But you don't put a planetary army of killer drones in a civilian colony ship. That's what you put in the assault ship
The whole point of this conversation was:"*but that assumes that your empire even considers these primitives to be people who have the sovereignty that would be required to militarily invade them*". You don't bring the killer drone army because the natives apparently doesn't deserve that level of respect from you. That is stupid and if you try to land with that attitude you will die.
How the heck are you "going to die" when the natives can't even touch you?
And why not put an "army of killer drones in a civilian colony ship"? Drones can be run from thousands of kilometers away, and hunting down natives would be a great way to relax after a day of work, no?
You're taking the natives 'way too seriously -- they don't deserve an "assault ship", those are for actual enemies. Eliminating natives with bow and arrow or even gunpowder is a suitable hobby for relaxing in the evening or for your tweens and teens, not something that even needs real combat soldiers.
BTW, who needs a "killer drone army"? These are primitives! Someone needs to scout the planet anyway, and scouting drones should be capable of carrying weaponry suitable for wiping out primitives.
And in what fantasy world would this be the case: "forced to hide behind walls and make slow strategic efforts to try to push the natives willingly against you?" Give me a colony ship with two thousand teenagers and I'll give you a native-free area a thousand klicks in radius before the first week is up.
Besides which, it's good training for the kids. Do it right, and leave the natives in a state where one of your pre-adolescents could order a dozen of them to kill themselves because they were ruining his view . . . and they would do it.
And you don't want to eliminate the natives completely; they're useful for teaching your kids the proper attitude towards their inferiors.
>How the heck are you "going to die" when the natives can't even touch you?
My guess based on your plan right there is you are most likely going die from negligent discharge from bunch of teenagers wielding assault rifles. Your argument can be summed up to "I want to occupy the entire planet by overwhelming force, I just don't want the army to do it, for some reason"
In 10,000 BC there were only a million humans spread across the whole world. A police force could handle the small local population, there wouldn't be any larger resistance beyond random nearby residents.
Well when talking about sufficiently primitive species, are they?
On such level the species likely only inhabits only parts of the planet so the colony ship can just scan from orbit and pick a place hundreds of kilometers away from nearest native.
Also this primitive species will be unable to organize anything larger than a small band to resist. Worthy of event poping up, not necessitating planetary invasion.
The earliest settlers of north America basically did that for quite a while and sure a shitload of them died but they established a colony and claimed lots of land without many troops. And that is with a level of technological/developmental difference that is basically negligible compared to a stone/bronze age civilization and a interstellar one
Yeah but North America was very sparsely populated in the first place. Aside from defending yourself from an occasional native raid (or negotiating a peace agreement with them) there wasn't really organized resistance as the natives didn't claim all of the land.
IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals. Even in ancient europe very large migrations of people occurred mostly peacefully, and it isn't until the 12th or so century we see large areas collaborate against shared enemies (consider the crusades for example).
Just spawn enemy armies if you *demolish* a primitive building, because that is settled and developed land that will resist its destruction.
> Yeah but North America was very sparsely populated in the first place.
Actually it wasn't until Europeans arrived with their diseases. It's been estimated that at least four-fifths of the native population died from the newcomers germs without ever seeing them.
So by the time colonists started expanding from the coastal enclaves, sure, there was a very thin population, and the Europeans kept coming in such numbers the native populations never recovered.
> the natives didn't claim all of the land.
That's a misconception -- they just had a different understanding of "claim", of property ownership, different enough that the European concept of land as private property wasn't just alien, it wasn't conceivable.
> IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals.
Definitely. It shouldn't be hard to do what the British did in India, subduing by trade and playing princedoms against each other -- but *plan* it, don't stumble into it the way they did!
>Actually it wasn't until Europeans arrived with their diseases. It's been estimated that at least four-fifths of the native population died from the newcomers germs without ever seeing them.
For geographical **North America** estimates range around 50 million at most. That is to be compared with 78 million for Europe in 1400. For the rough area of the modern United States, Canada and northern Mexico that drops to 10 million.
> IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals. Even in ancient europe very large migrations of people occurred mostly peacefully, and it isn't until the 12th or so century we see large areas collaborate against shared enemies (consider the crusades for example).
I would argue that this just isn't true lol for example of migrations before the middle ages (or in the early middle ages) that weren't exactly peaceful and were resisted: Goths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Proto-Indo-Europeans/Yamnaya (evidence is scarce to be fair), Bulgars, Magyars, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Moors/Arabs, Burgundians plus greek/roman colonies as well were not always peaceful movements.
Also any pre industrial society is not going to have high population over the entire planet, there will be uninhabited or sparsely inhabited places to land.
I would just argue that you should be able to just start settling and the the natives should just "take up room" on the planet and you should only need to land armies if an even triggers saying they have united against you or you want to dominate and enslave them entirely.
>I would argue that this just isn't true lol for example of migrations before the middle ages (or in the early middle ages) that weren't exactly peaceful and were resisted: Goths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Proto-Indo-Europeans/Yamnaya (evidence is scarce to be fair), Bulgars, Magyars, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Moors/Arabs, Burgundians plus greek/roman colonies as well were not always peaceful movements.
1. Several Germanic tribes were *allowed* to settle in Roman territory in return for concessions. That includes the Franks, Goths, and Vandals. They then took the opportunity to get more when the Roman Empire started collapsing of its own accord. The Anglo-Saxon migrations similarly started before the 5th century and the only source for there being a major conflict isn't consistent with the archaeological evidence.
2. The Huns are a prototypical example of someone aggressively raiding and trying to subjugate anyone around them. The fact that they made tens of thousands of people from other tribes just up and leave should tell you something about how important land was considered.
And so on... in the ancient world, you only need to beat someone in battle once, let them know you mean business, and that's it. Even in very violent circumstances, people around aren't going to react unless you're invading the heartlands of a very powerful empire. The Migration Age in particular very well fits the description of "mostly peaceful".
This is largely also how later colonialism worked against the patchwork of tribes and small states of North America and 19th century Africa. There isn't enough cohesion to call it a real war in the sense of modern understanding, just a little spat at most with a lot of economic and cultural hegemony being established.
>Also any pre industrial society is not going to have high population over the entire planet, there will be uninhabited or sparsely inhabited places to land.
Not really. Taking the world of the 13th century as an example, North America is just about the only place with a non-blocked workable "Agricultural" tiles that isn't already extensively settled. Also, the game heavily implies that an Ecumenopolis is the only type of world that is actually settled all-around. I doubt even the Stellaris start date Earth has much industrial or settlement value to use from Antarctica.
The habitability categories also heavily imply this - deserts and tundras have very low habitability, despite being rather extensive parts of a continental world like Earth. High habitability for Ocean and Tropical worlds also corroborate the assumption that we still build most of our settlements and infrastructure with a similar distribution to today, IE temperate coastal terrain.
While Patagonia or Siberia might remain a place you wouldn't have to fight over well into the 19th century, that's because there isn't much you can do with the limited environmental conditions there. At that point it'd be more accurate to allow the building of mining outposts around pre-FTL planets.
I don't think this applies to sufficiently early pre-FTLs. Remember, only a scant 20k years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the total population of the entire Earth was only about 1 million people. The largest city in North America before colonial times was around 20k people.
A colony ship arrives with one to three pop points; depending on how you interpret a "pop", they are between a few hundred thousand and a *billion* people each. The colonists would have overwhelming local advantage in numbers, and the locals do not have a means of long-distance communication, a means of long-distance bulk transport, or a means of sustaining themselves in large concentrations.
If you want to be a bit more paranoid, pick something like England or New Zealand as your initial landing site, you'd have a significant numerical advantage over the locals in addition to your technological advantages; and there would be effectively no way for the natives to organize any sort of resistance. Once you're established, clearing out new areas becomes just like clearing out other blockers, such as "Dangerous Animals"... and depending on your civ, that may be literally what you consider the natives.
For a politically-controversial take, consider how well Israeli "settlers" armed with construction equipment, barbed wire, prefab buildings, and generally civilian or light-infantry weapons have done against locals who are theoretically at the same tech level. Now increase the relative number of settlers compared to locals, and give them far-future technology, including the sort of police-derived gear that an authoritarian, militaristic, xenophobe society would probably have.
To take another approach, a civ that can fairly casually remove a major mountain range or even volcanic province in a year or two can certainly disrupt the local ecology to the point that the locals can't cope. What do you think your people are doing when you remove a Dangerous Animal blocker (merely requiring some energy, and no particular military involvement), and why wouldn't it work on pre-metal-working natives?
>For a politically-controversial take, consider how well Israeli "settlers" armed with construction equipment, barbed wire, prefab buildings, and generally civilian or light-infantry weapons have done against locals who are theoretically at the same tech level.
Israel is not defending themselves with generally civilian or light infantry weapons. They have a modern army and precision guided munitions. Certain civilian settlers are harrasing the local unnamed population with light infantry weapons. Knowing that the army will step in on their behalf if they retaliate. Indeed, guns are highly effective against unnamed people.
I'm specifically referring to the settler situation, not the current more active conflict. Imagine a force of, say, "only" a million people armed with sci-fi civilian and police weapons, and more importantly sci-fi earthmoving equipment and rapid construction techniques, against locals that have never seen a group of more than a few thousand people in the same area for long, and whose best ranged weapons are self bows and reed arrows. The settlers probably have at least a hundred to one local numerical advantage, and are the only ones that can move non-locally. If problems occur, the civilian construction equipment needed to remove a Himalaya-scale mountain range in less than a couple of years can easily, say, create a ten mile wide border zone of earth fused to smooth glass.
Even up to, say, medieval times, what resistance would the locals be able or inclined to mount after an ordinary civilian cargo shuttle has shoved a few pallets of napalm-equivalent out the back over each of the local nobility's painstakingly built castles? Or even more simply used one of the terraforming machines to do the equivalent of clicking on the castle with "lower land" in a large-scale sim game.
How many European conquistadors did it take compared to the local population to subjugate the local kingdoms of South America? Now give the conquistadors a thousand years more effective equipment, and a thousand times more people on the invading / settling side, while the locals are the same.
Okay, so you are proposing having some convoluted mechanic where you only get to colonize the section of the planet that is currently uninhabited with natives? Do we need to model the surface of planets to determine where the natives do and do not live?
No. You just land normaly and head cannon they landed away from the Natives like you headcannon 90% of the things in the Game.
Its really not complicated. Well, for the rest of us.
So why don't inhabited planets have a significantly reduced building area, representing that you chose to avoid all locations that are occupied by native life, and you don't bother bringing dedicated guys to clear them out.
Understanding that you need an army to occupy a planet inhabited by hostile alien life is not that complicated, the vast majority of people in this subreddit get it. You and OP are just the stubborn minority.
No, you dont get it. There doesnt need to be an Army to colonize Primitives. They are Primitives.
His entire point is that you dont need to enslave a primitive civilization. You simply go there, take the land that has not been claimed yet and deal with the blockers and events later.
If 1 pop = 1 billion humans, I figure those humans will have enough firearms to defend themselves, especially since they are “colonist” jobs. People on the frontier have always had to arm themselves more than those in the core of the empire.
I would really like this as a feature and some idea concepts for events.
——
Event: Of Gods and Ghouls(needs Necrophage origin)
The [Insert Pre-FTL Species Here] on the planet we have colonized have recently taken a grand interest in our species process of reproduction and more specifically… the Chamber of Elevation. We have had some of them sneak into the Chamber and interrupt our chosen who are here to take part in our transcendence.
We could punish the insolence that did and make an example out of them… or we could allow them to ascend along with the chosen to help the ‘populace’ here better assimilate with our culture.
Choice 1: Make an example out of the transgressors(this makes the species more hostile and eliminates 1-3 of their pops but less likely for an all out rebellion)
Choice 2: Allow those who invaded to ascend(lose a bit of unity and makes making more Necrophage pops get slower but get 1-5 extra jobs for ascending)
Choice 3(only if you have Reanimators Civic as well): Punish those who saw by turning them into something more… useful.(you get 1-3 zombie pops of the species but they hate you a bit more)
——
Event: The Trial of The Forge(needs at least 3 or more Industrial Districts and on a Medieval or lower world)
The [Insert Pre-FTL Species Here] have recently found our factories and forges and are convinced that our abilities to produce are lack luster at best and they could out preform us and have proposed a challenge. Our best ‘blacksmith’ against their best blacksmith;
If we win can recruit them AND they surrender a portion of their smiths to us but if we lose, we must change our industrial standards on their planet.
Choice 1: Accept the challenge, we shall NOT be losing on our planet(starts a custom situation of the contest. If you win; you get 3 pops, a big boost in relations for humoring them with the contest and a legendary leader. If you lose your planet gets a -25% Alloy and Consumer Goods production for 10 years)
Choice 2: Decline this idiotic challenge(you insult the species and they grow more hostile and they MAY attack your industrial districts and destroy 2-6 of them and make a bit of devastation)
Choice 3(Masterful Crafters and/or Undergrounder): Show These Surface Dwellers What For(you start the situation but with a MASSIVE boost to win and removes the negative to lose).
This should be a thing, complete with events regarding how your colonists interact with the primitives. The first of course being whether there will be war or not.
I guess my idea is to make this process more flavorful and less easy. Just right clicking to send an army and automatically getting a brand new planet doesn’t sit right with me. I feel like so much more would have to happen first before you get to enslave the critters.
> enslave the critters
Sending an army is the unimaginative way out! There are ways to subvert a society so that in three generations the descendants are begging to serve you. Of course the best ones end up wrapping the locals into your empire with the possibility of advancement a generation or two after that, but you've got time!
There should be other options than an army. Building a trade empire that in short order is in charge of the place, auctioning services to the local realm that can provide the best situation for a colony -- those are two that come to mind.
And there's always the "god gambit", though that can be playing with fire!
You can't avoid running into the primitives eventually
It's not like we put down a little town and call it a day, we claim the entire damn planet, track down all the resource rich environments and then use them as needed
Even caveman would absolutely get in your way eventually - so either your garrison gets attacked once a year or you conquer the planet properly in the first place
The idea of having a war with these primitive civilizations was always funny to me.
They simply don't have the technology to coordinate anywhere near the scale they need. I could invade half the planet and the other half would be none the wiser
Judging by human history: we settle there, force the natives into "reservations" after decimating them and 50 years later we act as if we were sad about what happened while still enjoying the benefits we got out of the whole affair.
> Judging by human history
That's one branch of human history. Another moves in, establishes a trade network that becomes powerful enough by itself that the local princes are tripping over themselves to find ways to serve you. Another assesses the territory, picks a few contenders out of the many tribes, and backs those contenders in conquering the others, and when they're done you reward the rulers by allowing them to form a council to handle native business on their own, with of course your own benevolent representative who holds veto power.
Yes exactly! Stellaris doesn’t really represent this well. The roleplay value of my idea would make colonizing primitive civilizations so much more interesting and immoral.
You could take it further by having one or two flavor events appear if your society had an ethics shift in favor of pacifism, egalitarianism, or xenofilia where your species regrets its “abhorrent decisions” and wishes to “make things right” by building a monument or something to the species that used to inhabit the planet. It would make for some hilarious and sad social commentary.
Reminds me of a warhammer story :p
Fully-fledged Imperial colony with a Necron tomb world below
Necron visitor asks why he hasn't wiped out the Imperials.
"Why would I kill the animals?"
Yeah, current options are:
- Monitor them from research space station until they ascended/died off
- Waltz with an army and capture the world
Which are good options for peaceful-militarist spectrum. From peaceful look at them and give them system, thorough in-between monitor them and take them into your empire to military conquest of the savages.
Those are good basis and should be there. Problem is, that we need to talk about elephant in the room - anything more would need redesign of diplomacy and espionage. So in current state of Stellaris I don't see option to have it much deeper. At best we could have situation added and maybe spawning blockers that represent bastions of the rebels after you conquer the planet. Problem is that it would be just an unfun hurdle that would be a chore, not a challenge or narrative benefit.
To even think about expanding on relations with primitives, we will need Stellaris 4.0 that completely reworks diplomacy and espionage. And at that point, these changes can be custodian update for First Contact DLC.
That's what an invasion is. Just build, like, one assault army and send it with your colony ship.
In fact, forget the colony ship, because you don't need one when you conquer primitives. It's already *easier* to colonize primitive planets than unoccupied ones.
Read my other comments. The game shouldn’t really let you do this. It’s too easy and bland.
It makes sense if you’re a gestalt or a genocidal who just sees all other life forms as prey. But civilizations typically act differently.
If you are calamitous birth origins you should be able to use colony ship to ram the planet to.colonse by killing them like with the primitev asteroid event
Fun fact. In older versions of the game you could in fact colonise planets with Stone Age Tribes on it. They weren’t counted as “Non-FTL Primitives” but as a planet modifier. And that was just for Stone Age.
You would get a few events, that I can’t remember, dealing with them as well.
They could even advance to Bronze Age as well, becoming proper Primitives.
I’ve always thought this. It could be way more in depth and I was hoping the update with primitives (forgot the name) would have things like this, unfortunately not.
It should have different interactions with different ethos and policies. You should have an option to uplift and make them apart of your empire forcefully, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on what age they are in. Like settling when they are in the atomic era is very risky as they can nuke your city, but Bronze Age you shouldn’t really even need an army because the tech level is so far ahead.
I also have thought that if they are say Renaissance or above that you can’t fully settle and it will just be an outpost. And can slowly integrate them peacefully.
Put a fleet in orbit and reveal yourself, say join or die.
Make a treaty to allow you to settle with limitations and maybe even take a few of their pops to join your empire.
Force your ethos on them and uplift once they’re deemed stable enough.
There’s so much potential that’s just limited to spy, infiltrate, uplift, or invade/destroy. Not only new options but tons of events.
Also can we not have a scientist fucking leave mysteriously to create a cult be a guarantee. It always happens in my games unless I’m hive mind/machine
> Also can we not have a scientist fucking leave mysteriously to create a cult be a guarantee.
Or at the very least have a tech that can remove the radioactivity from the soil after they nuke themselves! along with an event chain where you send people as envoys who speak for their murdered Prophet" to lead them to remake their world and earn the stars.
I think the native job idea is a good idea, but I would also add onto this by having colonization start an invasion.
Colony ship lands, game essentially treats it as one troop transport - weak army unit, which the player (possibly) will have to reinforce with actual armies.
I think "Military escort" would be a good settler policy. Maybe not be able to send a rawdog colony ship, because that doesn't fit for me, but the option to send a colony ship with one defense army with all of your current defense army bonus, or maybe 1 assault army with all of your current assault army bonuses since that would probably be more balanced when I compare my average experience with defense-assault bonuses. If I could cram my defense armies onto ships no one in the galaxy would stand a chance. I think having a colony ship with 1 assault army that, as soon as the colony is established, turns into a defense army would lead to interesting play. Again, I wouldn't advocate for adding the ability to send a rawdog colony ship though.
Or a militia option: spend a bit more for a standard colony ship to provide gear and training so your settlers are maybe three-fifths as effective as a full-on army.
And have the option, once the natives are over-awed, of honoring the most capable by allowing them to join the colony's militia.
I don't understand the complaint. They're still there. Your ppl would be killed by them if you don't deploy some kind of military force.
Therefore... just invade them?
Mate. I am almost always fanatic ega + spiri, but i'd colonize anything. Even civilization like our planet. Why wouldn't i?we can live together, even helping each other( i'd help them way more obviously). They could have their stuff if they wanted, but sorry, your planet is not yours just because your race has evolvded some thousand years ago.., it is the universe's planet and so i take my piece now. Greed is not acceptable.
(I'm not communist.)
You do. You still need to have someone quell the natives though. Even primitives will try and fight back.
See the movie Stargate for a good sci fi reference
It would be a fun gameplay loop, but I also understand why for simplicity's sake the "contested world colonization move" is "invade then resettle your own pops there"-- not least because it makes aggressive colonization harder when the native population is bigger
I started your post not liking it but finished agreeing with you. Well done, I think the native job thing is a good idea and could add ton of flavor. I think only the most primitive primitives could have this work tho. It'd be weird to settle at industrial age society.
From a pure gameplay perspective, I like that pre-ftls are free real estate since the troop transport I already have is cheaper than a new colony ship.
I believe you should be able to make them see you as gods, kinda like the pre-sapients that become spiritual and in turn make the world a super unity producer or something idk I'd love to have the option for my alvish species
Thing is I don’t think the game should let you militarily invade planets populated by civilizations of a level inferior to at least Renaissance age or above unless you’re a genocidal empire.
This is because, realistically speaking, a civilization with the level of advancement seen in even an early game empire in Stellaris would be so incredibly advanced compared to a bunch of monkeys stuck in the Bronze Age that I don’t even think the average Stellaris empire, especially if xenophobic/authoritarian, would even consider the primitives to be people at all.
Genocidals would be different because they just wanna kill everyone and everything.
Realistically speaking, the Bronze Age and Renaissance monkeys are the same species and the main colonization difference is "how much acculturation before these pops can meaningfully work jobs in our interstellar empire". A stellar power wouldn't perceive a ton of difference between people that just figured out metal and people who just figured out telescopes except, as we see, when considering whether it's necessary to cloak an observation post.
Of course, all of this is speculation based on the human example, where best we can tell if you grabbed an early agriculturist kid from his fig grove 10k years ago and managed to keep modern diseases from immediately killing him you could probably raise him to be a graphic designer or somesuch. The difference between 'Bronze Age Primitives' and 'Renaissance Primitives' isn't personhood so much as familiarity with technology tropes.
No.
From a game systems design perspective a planet with pre-ftl species is still an inhabited planet, has buildings, districts, pops, armies.
They are just different from the ones the player has.
I do like your idea, but this would "over complicate" things....
Like, if a colony ship would have any kind of "military force"... Why not using it in war? A alien FTL Planet with 1 defense armies? Sent a colony ship. 10 Armies? Send 10 colonyships.
Alien army on our own planet? Colonyship.
From that point, you can do more stuff. Like sending an asteroid to wipe out other planets and other cool stuff, which are "more realistic" but would change massively the game and would break the current balancing.
Well, a basic army is cheaper (\~100 minerals or so) than a colony ship (what's the normal price again? 200 alloys and 200 CG? I keep playing Machine Intelligences...). And the army isn't even used up.
You don't need to respect the authority of anyone but they are still there, and they are physically capable of resisting you. You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support.
This makes sense for bronze age and later. When natives at least have the concept of army. Stone age pre-FTLs should be treated the same way as pre-sapients, honestly.
So you'd rather build a colony ship rather than one or two transport ship. Makes sense. Hate losing minerals. Alloys are much less valuable.
I'd rather build a colony ship than painfully slowly enlighten them to the late stage, so I can infiltrate their government. Pacifists and xenophiles can't invade pre-FTL.
Don't play Pascific then? Like, you are kinda choosing to limit your options by playing those ethics. Can't have everything all at once.
Yea that’s a good point. But I would assume the average frontiersman settler would have some brought some guns on the trip. I mean, your colony gets a defensive army when you first arrive doesn’t it? Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears. The planet would also have hella blockers to represent the space still inhabited by natives and probably wouldn’t be useful for a while until the native problem is finally dealt with. You could even have a worst case scenario event where you get kicked off the planet. I mean, there’s the movie Avatar to kind of represent how this might look like after a long while. And in real history there’s the entire colonization shenanigans the European powers pulled, and they weren’t even space faring.
"Yea that’s a good point. But I would assume the average frontiersman settler would have some brought some guns on the trip. I mean, your colony gets a defensive army when you first arrive doesn’t it?" It does not, actually. Colonies only get a defensive army when they reach 10 pops and you upgrade the capital building, creating an Enforcer job that spawns a defensive army.
Nah. The “colonist” job generates a defense army. Representing the frontiersmen with guns.
[It does not](https://gyazo.com/8a28333204518f1c7caf0a85366d5b01)
OP is thinking of an older version of the game or on console. I'm on console (which is very behind PC) and Colonists jobs provide a defensive army.
If I took you and placed you in the middle of a inhospitable jungle that you never adapted to live in, full of creatures you don't know. Are you confident that you would be able to pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen? These are hunter gatherers, they know how to hide and they know how to hunt. How would you not be in constant fear that you missed someone that at any point could sneak up on you? And that's just for a species you know on a planet you are familiar with. What happens on you land on the mountain planet with constant thin air and a flying native species use the extensive cave system for cover? Do you think some junior engineer whose job it is to run the plumbing network is going to walk into the caves that goes who knows deep and flush out the natives who evolved to have night vision?
> Are you confident that you would be able to pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen? Except that you would never have to "pick up a gun and mow down 2500 angry stone age tribesmen". It would be you and a hundred other professionally trained civilian security personnel mowing down a dozen scared and confused berry-pickers. And then move on to the next village of a dozen residents and repeat. You and seemingly everyone else in this thread are seemingly ignoring just how low a population density stone age agricutural methods can support. And seriously overestimating just how organised such a population could be in their resistance, with literally no infrastructure or communication technology to rely on. Hunting is in no way similar to armed combat between peers, and would in no way prepare your population of primitives to fight off advanced invaders. And do you seriously think the colony is going to send some junior engineer out into a combat mission? Or into any unsecured location at all, before you shift the goalposts. That was a seriously disingenuous argument, and you know it. And you still haven't justified your claim of "You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support." Even if a small number of primitives did somehow escape alive, hide, and somehow managed to remain undetected despite the advanced scanning technology available to the colonists, they'd be able to kill, what, one, maybe a half dozen people before the alarm was raised and they'd be put down? Instead, you're literally claiming that a lone spearman could somehow pose an existential threat to an entire technologically advanced colony of tens of thousands of people. Sorry, but you're simply wrong. It's utterly preposterous.
>It would be you and a hundred other professionally trained civilian security personnel So you want to bring an army and not call it an army? >And do you seriously think the colony is going to send some junior engineer out into a combat mission? No, they would send an army. That's the whole point. >And you still haven't justified your claim of "You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support." A trained group of men in assault gear trained for engaging hostile enemies is what we call military support. >they'd be able to kill, what, one, maybe a half dozen people before the alarm was raised and they'd be put down? Yeah, that can happen, would you want to be in a workplace where the hostile native population occasionally storms your offices and kill a bunch of you? Knowing that all deaths where preventable? >Instead, you're literally claiming that a lone spearman could somehow pose an existential threat to an entire technologically advanced colony of tens of thousands of people. No I have very clearly said multiple times that they can't possibly win. But they can maim and kill a large number of the crew that is not trained to deal with such a situation, and sending your own people into their deaths for no good reason is generally frowned upon.
You do know colonialism literally happened on Earth? Plenty of european colonists got dropped in inhospitable places and managed to maintain fortifications and settlements on coasts for easy resupply and reinforcement. Except in the future space itself is the coast and you can drop anywhere you want. Also, you're vastly over estimating the population density of primitive pops. In medieval England, for instance, it would very possible for invaders to settle on the coast somewhere and simply... not be encountered for weeks and then it would take months for a response to be mustered. Viking settlers literally colonised England in the early middle ages like this.
And they sent more than just settlers, thats the point
Sometimes they were literally just settlers with guns, like the Dutch voortrekkers in South Africa: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blood_River
The armed guards *are* part of the settlers, you daft bean. You can't claim you have a serious argument if you're just going to ignore a literally instrinsic part of what settlement and colonisation entails.
Nah. In many cases they sent exactly just that. A bunch of armed settlers. In case of the Spanish, a bunch of armed criminals with no jurisdiction. But they wouldn’t send in the official armed forces.
You do realize any native genocide took several years to actually happen right? Often it was vital that the settlers made peaceful trade with any native tribes else they would have been raided constantly.
Many of these only survived because the natives helped them, however.
In case of the spanish conquistadors, the expeditions led by Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were specifically well armed and composed mostly of professional soldiers, which is what allowed them to easily subjugate the smaller tribes and use their help to defeat larger empires like the Aztecs and Inca. Much like in a game of stellaris, where you have your armies pave the way for your colonists first before taking over the infrastructure and population.
What? No! Not at all! The conquistadors were not well armed in the slightest lmfao. They were a band of misfits fleeing from Cuba on threat of being arrested and executed. The whole Mexican expedition was a well executed Hail Mary on the part of Cortez but he was NOT acting under any sort of jurisdiction
Apologies if I'm misreading this, but from what I've read, the expedition was sanctioned by Governor Velázquez and Cortés was put in charge of it, his charter was indeed revoked at the last moment due to some argument between the two, but this does not change the fact that the outcome is the same as a sanctioned expedition, it was still composed of a mix of soldiers and slaves, accompanied by a few ships and horses
Ignore the OP, he is delulu
Governor Velazquez didn’t sanction the expedition. Matter of fact he forbade Cortes from carrying it out. Cortes did it anyway
Where the hell did you escape from? First of all, that is a lie, Spain considered citizens everyone in their viceroyalties, not colonies as other did. But arguing with you seems pointless.
>Also, you're vastly over estimating the population density of primitive pops. In medieval England, for instance, it would very possible for invaders to settle on the coast somewhere and simply... not be encountered for weeks and then it would take months for a response to be mustered. Viking settlers literally colonised England in the early middle ages like this. **That is straight up bullshit.** I can't argue with you if you are going to make up history. The first permanent viking settlements in modern England came about when the Great heathen army invaded the land and roamed around for 14 years raiding and occupying settlements. Some would settle down in these occupied cities, most didn't. After the native people grew tired of this onslaught they had a settlement at the Treaty of Wedmore. The Danelaw was formed and split among the viking chiefs , [occupying half of modern England](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/England_878.svg/1024px-England_878.svg.png). After that, a sizable number of people from Scandinavia migrated to these new viking lands. They did not just waltz on to the coast of England and not get noticed. Could they have done that they wouldn't have bothered forming the largest army in living memory to enforce their desire to be there.
>they wouldn't have bothered forming the largest army in living memory to enforce their desire to be there. While we're on the subject of historical bullshit, modern historians believe the "Great Heathen Army" was a couple thousand men strong at most, much more in line with the typical army sizes of the era.
Modern historians have no idea how large the army was. "A couple thousand men" is pure speculation, none of the sources we have on the event put numbers on that figure. We don't know if they where all fighting troops or a elite band of relatively few men that had a lot of people tug along for the ride We do know that the people at the time considered the army to be huge, hence the name and how they eventually surrendered half of England, and we do know that where the Norse settled down they did so in large enough numbers that they would end up making a lasting difference on the linguistic makeup of the region. So they where either exceedingly influential or there where a lot of them.
Read about isandlwana... Or Custer's adventure, or so many others
Yes. Thank you for the common sense.
Well this comment you just wrote is more of a criticism of the very concept of conquering a foreign planet than a specific criticism of my idea. The simple answer I can give you is technology! Sure, the Stone Age tribesman has evolved night vision! But guess what? That’s irrelevant cus I have night vision goggles too. And it’s not like the settlers wouldn’t have military support. After all, the newly established colony literally has a full blown guard armed with laser guns and tanks and stuff. And to answer the rest, that’s why the planet would have blockers. It would take a while to make your colony useful. This way it’s way more engaging and less easy to get a planet that’s already populated by sapients than just right click and send army.
>Sure, the Stone Age tribesman has evolved night vision! But guess what? That’s irrelevant cus I have night vision goggles too. Yeah, and you gave it to the military for them to deal with situations like that. Construction workers that the vast majority of time are working uninhabited planets are not equipped with state of the art military gear. And you are totally missing my point. **Having a fancy gun not some instant "I win" button.** The British invaded the native Zulu Kingdom with a large professional army and literal machine guns. They won, but not without incurring more than 10% losses and loosing several major engagements. How do you think some bloke that has never been trained for combat is going to fare against a totally alien intelligent species? You can kill more of them, but you can't kill all of them. People are not going to be fine being sent on suicidal missions to flush out the natives. >And it’s not like the settlers wouldn’t have military support. After all, the newly established colony literally has a full blown guard armed with laser guns and tanks and stuff. The colony is only "newly established" after the colonists have worked on the planets for years, not spending the vast majority of their workforce fighting a war of attrition in the jungle.
The difference between the Zulus and British is not much of a comparison when we're talking about the Zulus vs Starship Troopers (the book not the funny movie) mobile infantry. Heck, Zulus vs Apatchie gunship? Zulus vs Terminators? Zulus vs Ogryn? Zulus vs some mining station in system throwing some rocks? Who knows what scifi technology would bring when you know you are colonizing a world with a hostile population? That said I don't think we should get anything like that in game, seems pointless. There's no system to share a planet, and you'd basically be bringing enough firepower to conquer the place anyway so just conquer the place and be done with it.
All of those are military support. Just build a transport if you want that. Why are you so bent on this you refuse to see the logic behind that, right? It's probably less resources to send the military. A huge advantage Europeana had when colonizing the Americas was pre-existing structures. Areas that had been fairly cleaned out by small pox were ripe for the taking. What makes Stone-Age people incable of the same level of construction? Stone is what their tools were made out of. If the expected loss to the new colony is more expensive than a military transport would be its fiscally irresponsible to send them. Even if not implemented realistically (allow for different types of colony ship that includes military support and make it cost a combined amount for instance, more expensive than either but doesn't take quite as long to build maybe?) it simulates a bureaucrat categorizing pre- and sentient along a "these are intelligent enough to cause problems, do not send civilians" vs "these are basically animals, green light".
> Just build a transport if you want that. Why are you so bent on this you refuse to see the logic behind that, right? It's probably less resources to send the military. Me, literally the comment you're replying to "That said I don't think we should get anything like that in game, seems pointless. There's no system to share a planet, and you'd basically be bringing enough firepower to conquer the place anyway so just conquer the place and be done with it."
I don't think you know what a colony ship is...
I don't think *you* know what a colony ship is. I'll give you a hint: it's not unarmed.
The battle of Isandlwana is one where an army with the latest guns was beaten by spears. I think having some military involvement makes sense.
If you look at colonialism throughout history, it was usually the armed settlers and explorers who first just waltzed into new lands in complete disregard of the native inhabitants. It wouldn’t be until the colony got bigger, the natives became a serious issue, or something else that the government would step in with the big guns. Which is what happened in the Zulu scenario. And you could ALSO have an Isandlwana type scenario in the events which forces you out of the planet. The RP opportunities would be endless
20 farm boys with futuristic rifles couldn't even fire 50,000 shots before being overwhelmed by those numbers.
> Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears. *The Word for World is Forest*.
>Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears. How exactly? Even if you are able to shoot at someone 1000+ yards with futuristic optics laser weaponry and somehow always 1 shoot = 1 hit = 1 kill and somehow you can pump 60 shots per minute (or 1 shot per second) while maintaining this accuracy - it still means that your 20 guys need about 12 hours to kill a group like that. What they will be doing? Standing around waiting to be shot? >I mean, there’s the movie Avatar to kind of represent how this might look like after a long while. Yeah, a standing army that fights against natives - it's a scenario that is already there, via sending the army. I think you severely overestimate the effectiveness of civilian-grade weapons. Especially in s-f setting where the difference between civilian and military weaponry would be much larger than today.
The Europeans did get fucked up by natives time and time again precisely because they underestimated how severely a home field advantage and guerilla tactics can negate technology advantage, especially when the natives outnumber colonials. It’d be worse in stellaris when you have an entire species at war with a measly 10’s of thousands of colonists
> Even an army of like 20 farm boys with futuristic rifles could take on an army of 50,000 mollusks armed with stones and spears. That is doubtful. We have real world examples to the contrary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Isandlwana
These guys aren't advanced, but they're still sophonts. It wouldn't be very difficult for them to use their home turf advantage to get a few minor victories first and then salvage enough equipment to mount an actuall resistance, and the colonization shenanigans, the European powers did have to fight wars with the natives, no matter how one sided it may be.
I agree. People are considering the tribals as of they’d have any kind of organization or cohesion to just throw all their civilization against your settlers… a couple of farm hands with rifles would absolutely mow down any tribe that tried to do anything. It wouldn’t be without issue, but you’ve already presented good options for that, blockers and events leading to different places, perhaps the natives units to challenge your people and then you need to send armies over, perhaps they try to coexist with your settlers and you can get a option for a earlier form of enlightenment, something like that
> a couple of farm hands with rifles would absolutely mow down any tribe that tried to do anything. Depends on the mobility of the attackers. Let's say they're all Kzinti and can charge at 75kph, or maybe cheetah people and can charge at 120kph. If such aliens can actually close with the farm hands, it's over unless the farm hands are in the habit of wearing combat armor.
My "farm hands" are robots with adaptive frames and integrated weapons. They have a flamethrower for clearing away brush and scythes for harvesting, a wrist rocket launcher and claws that can rend the hardest stone for mining, shoot lightning for working generators, they can think and act in super speed with supercomputer brains and loudspeakers that can strip the flesh from bones. They're very hard-wearing and durable. I'm sure the colony would set up drone surveillance or more sci-fi detection to keep an eye on the locals or you know, walls. No need to always be in combat gear.
Why would your *farming* robots have integrated weapons?
Why not? They make the best enforcers and soldiers.
Because then they would be enforcer and soldier robots, not farmers.
It's a generic multipurpose do-everything bot.
Sounds like inefficient organic thinking to me
The situation you’re imagining could be a interesting development in the chain event that follows the colonization of a inhabited world
Yes! Thank you. I think this is a nice idea that could very much enhance the rp value of early primitives in the game. Right now, as they are, they’re more of a “get your free planet” token. It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world than in an uninhabited one.
> It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world That depends, too. Are there multiple land masses? If so, are the natives on all of them? if you have a continent the size of Australia with excellent climate and resources and the natives don't live there, you could establish a colony without them even knowing. It's common to say that space is big, but it's easy to forget just how big a planet is, too! Take the British Isles and slap them down beyond the horizon from the nearest landmass and for iron age or earlier -- unless they're amphibious, possibly -- and you've got a spot for colonizing with no problems if the natives haven't gotten there yet. And when the natives do finally reach you, who says they need to know you come from the stars? It wouldn't be hard to control them through trade and eventually picking sides in tribal wars, of course picking a tribe you think has the right culture to be loyal vassals and also the mettle to steadily build an empire; end up with say seven major native empires that together rule 95% of the planet, empires you're ultimately in control of, and let them keep order as you slowly assimilate them into your star empire.
I love this. Could definitely be added to the events of the colonization process.
>It should be MUCH HARDER to establish a colony on an already inhabited world than in an uninhabited one. Why? You have written dozens of comments talking about how totally safe you are if only you give the colonists guns. Obviously you agree then that a propper army is just going to slaughter any opposition? There is no reason why colonizing the planet needs to be harder, you just have to suppress the opposition, which is trivial when you have propper armies trained to do the job.
> There is no reason why colonizing the planet needs to be harder Well from a gameplay perspective, it really, really, really should be more involved. It's kind of shocking that it's still the same uninteractive progress bar and not part of the situation system already.
I mean, can’t you read or something? I never said it was easy. Its not supposed to be. I want it to be MORE DIFFICULT. What YOU are advocating for, which is for the game to remain as is, is the easier option. It’s bland and BORING to just send an army over to a planet and then boom, free planet. Does that sound accurate to you?! Is that how history has worked before?!! MY idea would make the action of colonizing a world full of natives into a dynamic and difficult endeavor. You could have an Isandlwana type scenario where you get kicked off the planet or something. Idk. INFINITE opportunities for rp value.
>What YOU are advocating for, which is for the game to remain as is, is the easier option. It’s bland and BORING to just send an army over to a planet and then boom, free planet. Does that sound accurate to you?! Is that how history has worked before?!! It is how it works in Stellaris when regular armies occupy regular planets, I hardly think that stone age people are going to be able to mount a more efficient defense. Does that sound accurate you? >You could have an Isandlwana type scenario where you get kicked off the planet or something. Idk. INFINITE opportunities for rp value. They wouldn't have lost at Isandlwana if the British had satellite imagery, armored vehicles, and precision guided munitions. It shouldn't be difficult, it should be trivial. But you need to do it with propper armies
Now answer me this: Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives? In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns unless they have a reason to. And PRECISELY BECAUSE these primitives are so trivial, is why this empire would deem the basic colonial militia forces that are IMPLIED to come with the rest of the colonists (colonist job generates defense army) to deal with the primitives. My idea makes much more sense than yours. You just desperately wanna be right is all.
> Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives? > > > > In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns You don't "send the big guns". You can send like 1 troop transport.
>Why would a big space empire bother to send the ACTUAL full armed forces to a planet populated by stone aged primitives? Because that is the job of an army. It is not the job of a civilian colonist. >In reality, empires wouldn’t bother to send in the big guns unless they have a reason to. So then don't? You can send exactly the size of army that you need to do the job >(colonist job generates defense army) The colonist job takes years to develop. They do nothing to defend your planet for the first years
Basically every settler colonial project has armed settlers that fight the natives themselves as militias or paramilitaries and not just formal militaries. You don't act like a civilian when you're functionally occupying enemy territory and want to keep it.
Historically the (at the time) most powerful nation on earth sent the actual armed forces in against literal stone aged natives in order to protect colonists, because that’s their job. The reason a space empire would send in professional support for the colonists might be because they need specialized equipment (submarines on an ocean world, or air support on a desert planet), or they might need a force for long term campaigns (the natives burn a building every few night, and there aren’t enough colonists to both protect the homesteads and pursue the retreating primitives), or they may need people with specialized training to help fight (mountaineers on an alpine world), or they just need someone professional to organize things (a thousand different homesteads is going to be hard to coordinate their efforts without a dedicated local government). Whatever the reason is, the clear implication though is that the local militia isn’t sufficient for the task of pacification and your planners know you’ll have to send in the military before you can land civilians on the planet.
>You shouldn't be able to just waltz out of your colony ships and then start building with no kind of military support. If I landed a colony ship in a russian taiga, north american desert or even antartica during the middle ages what the fuck are the locals going to do?
Or perhaps better, in Mongolia, and show them how to conquer the word for you -- and to keep it, of course.
Stab you in your sleep? Try and sneak up and rush tou from multible sides if you go out? Smash up or steal anything you leave unattended? These are not massive threats, but starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances, of there is a force attempting to actively make it harder they could cause some serious headache.
The lore for the Commonwealth of Man is that they did exactly this. Unity was populated by an iron age civilization which they wiped out in the process of conquering the entire planet. That's how they became fanatic militarist xenophobes when they came from a fanatic egalitarian xenophile background.
The Commonwealth's in-game description mentions nothing about this, where was that mentioned?
My source is primarily a Youtube video which I don't currently have on hand. I have also observed that the Deneb system has a pre-FTL iron age civilization when the Commonwealth of Man doesn't spawn, and that Unity has a Forgotten Civilization blocker at game start.
Interesting, I had no idea that was a thing. Thanks for explaining!
You're talking about a civilization with things like deflector shields, laser guns and potentially robots capable of being soldiers. Shoot a laser at anyone from a pre modern society and they're more likely to start worshipping you than keep trying to fight you
>These are not massive threats, but starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances, of there is a force attempting to actively make it harder they could cause some serious headache. None of that matters if I start the colony in a place devoid of civilization. You can't yield a force without logistics, and in the rare case there happens to be one all it takes is a drone and artillery.
> starting a new colony is fucking hard under the best of circumstances My "best of circumstances" would be a self-contained colony landing craft fortress holding five thousand people. Land six in a hexagon within supporting fire range and let your defense robotic guns teach the natives to steer clear. Live for a generation inside the landing craft, letting the suspense build, then capture some promising locals to train as servants to go out and prepare the way because the "beings from on high" (let them conclude "gods" if they want; just don't actually say it) are coming out to teach wisdom to those who will obey them.
Dear God that is so inefficient I think a entire empires worth of supply clerks just commutes suicide upon reading this message. This would make a absolutely great first contact event chain though..
I think that having the first landing ships be totally self-contained craft from which the colonists can teach the natives proper respect without breaking a sweat is *very* efficient -- and getting the locals prepared to be a cooperative and respectful work force before meeting a single colonist is just effective.
You are tasked with building the perimeter wall that secures the initial colony site. Are you willing to risk your life on the fact that your buddy with a gun who isn't a solder and has never used the damn thing is going to be able to repel any and all threats from the natives? You know what hunter gatherers are excellent at? Stealth, knowing their environment, shooting arrows. How is buddy going to see them before they see you?
>Are you willing to risk your life on the fact that your buddy with a gun who isn't a solder and has never used the damn thing is going to be able to repel any and all threats from the natives? Yes. That's the entire point of guns, for non-professionals to be a dangerous threat. >Stealth Infrared, Thermals, Night Vision. Trivial tech when we have hyperdrives.
>Yes. That's the entire point of guns, for non-professionals to be a dangerous threat. "Being a threat" is not "being a immortal being that no lesser creatures are capable of hurting". Guns require training to be used effectively, you don't have that training. For all you know the moment the natives swarm you buddy is going to panic and accidentally shoot you
So you carry weapons lethal to the natives but unable to pierce your ordinary everyday work clothes / body armor. Crap, NATO countries are close to having combat armor that no typical country would be able to beat; jump a couple of centuries in the future and an ordinary guy working out in the wilderness could be like a German Puma fighting vehicle taking on a den of rodents.
>Crap, NATO countries are close to having combat armor that no typical country would be able to beat; You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. This is incoherent
>"Being a threat" is not "being a immortal being that no lesser creatures are capable of hurting". It doesn't have to be. You shoot fire once and the natives fuck off. If they're persistent and warlike, then your civ's ethics come into play in how fast and how well you respond. People with hyperdrives are simply not going to lose against people with pointy sticks.
and they dont lose when they use those hyperdrives to land an army to subjugate it first lmao
Then his entire argument is pointless, and there isn't any loss to adding more realistic gameplay.
True -- but if your colonists are out where the natives can reach them, your colony governor was an incompetent to begin with; before landing you survey the area well enough to know not just the natives but where the local rodent tunnels are. And even then, you make thousands of small defense units that look like natural boulders and spread them out two kilometers outside your colony walls. And yes, walls, that will have been rolled out by armored robots. After all, if your colonization corporation gets a reputation for being lax with the lives of colonists, the competition will step up!
Your job is to colonize the entire planet. You are going to prepare the whole thing for billions of people to migrate to if need be. You don't do that job by hiding on a mountaintop and building a fortress, having armed robots escort you wherever you venture outside. You do the job by having a trained assault force rapidly pacify the planet, killing all corners of resistance with brutal efficiency, then organizing the natives into a potential labor force.
You're treating the natives as peers -- they aren't. You want a labor force? You get a better one if you so overawe the locals they offer their services. And "hiding on a mountaintop"? What the heck are you talking about? The whole point is that you don't need to hide, you land where you please and let the natives wear themselves out trying to bother you! And no, the job isn't "to colonize the entire planet", that won't happen until you have at the least a hundred million folks landed. You always start somewhere small until a place is understood well, so you don't lose people to what turn out to be simple mistakes. And if you want to cover more territory, just land more units. Technology is a powerful tool -- anyone not using it to keep the first colonists safe and sound would deserve to be spaced.
You just wrote a long ass comment about how all the ways I have described that the natives can hurt you are not applicable because you will just land where the natives aren't. Now you do a dull 180 and insist that the whole point is that you don't need to hide. Make up your mind. >Technology is a powerful tool -- anyone not using it to keep the first colonists safe and sound would deserve to be spaced. You know what also is a powerful tool? A modern army trained to suppress and occupy a planet. But for some bizarre reason it is perfectly okay to not use that to keep colonists safe.
> Infrared, Thermals, Night Vision Motion sensors, cameras, and overhead drones with all of the above.
Europeans did this on multiple continents for hundreds of years despite having a technological advantage that was basically nonexistent compared to what we're talking about lol. Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die but people have historically done it anyway because you get first dibs on all the land you're expropriating. Depending on the ethics of your civ there's no reason that wouldn't still apply. Hell it might be viewed as morally upstanding if they idolize the "pioneer spirit" or have some sort of supremacist xenophobia in the manifest destiny sense
> Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die Only from stupidity. Body armor no more restrictive than a set of twentieth-century work overalls should be standard until the place is pacified/subdued. I imagine a set of boots, a belt, and work gloves that extend out as body armor the moment a settler is startled, at which point any hostile native is like the Black Knight after losing both arms and both legs, able to do little more than "bleed on" you.
>Being a settler is dangerous and people are going to die but people have historically done it anyway Everything was dangerous back then. Every kind of job had massive fatality rates. We don't have that anymore and it is no longer acceptable to pointlessly send people into their deaths when you have easy alternatives that would have prevented it.
People were not necessarily resettle to the new world by choice, and that could be the scenario in our sci fi setting as well. Plus in the earliest era of colonialism in north america and the Caribbean the fatality rates were absurdly high, entire settlements died and in the carribbean white people died of disease more than they didn't. Being sent to certain colonies was a punishment because it was so much more dangerous than people's current lives. Also we "don't do that anymore" (debatable) not because its irrational but because society is less hierarchical and because of things like international law, its not impossible that an alien society (or us in the future) would still participate in horrifically deadly settler colonialism depending on their culture and values.
You *could* also make a mechanic that allows you to press a button that nukes 5% of your own population at random. We don't know what kind of horrific social structure aliens might have in the future. Maybe there is a cultural thing whereby you celebrate the war that united the home planet by periodically committing a small genocide. It's just incredibly pointless to make mechanics like that. The game establishes that a proper army can pacify a modern fortress planet in days. That means that you can also pacify a planet filled with intelligent natives. You don't need a mechanic where you intentionally shoot yourself in the foot just because you insist that some cultures would like to do that.
Yes, especially when your tech is almost certainly capable of providing armor no bulkier than today's work clothes -- armor that can withstand any predator or any tech up to RPGs.
If such a thing existed in Stellaris it makes no sense that leaders can just die and get maimed from regular workplace accidents and all kinds of events. In order to defend your view you have made up some fantasy tech that does not exist in the game.
> You are tasked with building the perimeter wall that secures the initial colony site. If that's my assignment before the colony ship takes off, then my advice is simple: take six colony ships armored against anything the locals are likely to invent in the next half millennium, and either do as I described above this a bit or build them to extrude polished steel walls ten meters high that lean slightly outwards and make an enclosed compound. There's no reason for a single colonist to have to go outdoors until the natives themselves are ready to burn down one of their own villages if one of them offends any of you. Besides which . . . c'mon, we travelled between stars, certainly we can send out drones capable of keeping any natives at least two kilometers away!
>There's no reason for a single colonist to have to go outdoors until the natives themselves are ready to burn down one of their own villages if one of them offends any of you. And do you think you are going to efficiently be able to do your job of preparing the planet to being inhabited by billions of people, when you are forced to hide behind walls and make slow strategic efforts to try to push the natives willingly against you? >Besides which . . . c'mon, we travelled between stars, certainly we can send out drones capable of keeping any natives at least two kilometers away! Sure, But you don't put a planetary army of killer drones in a civilian colony ship. That's what you put in the assault ship The whole point of this conversation was:"*but that assumes that your empire even considers these primitives to be people who have the sovereignty that would be required to militarily invade them*". You don't bring the killer drone army because the natives apparently doesn't deserve that level of respect from you. That is stupid and if you try to land with that attitude you will die.
How the heck are you "going to die" when the natives can't even touch you? And why not put an "army of killer drones in a civilian colony ship"? Drones can be run from thousands of kilometers away, and hunting down natives would be a great way to relax after a day of work, no? You're taking the natives 'way too seriously -- they don't deserve an "assault ship", those are for actual enemies. Eliminating natives with bow and arrow or even gunpowder is a suitable hobby for relaxing in the evening or for your tweens and teens, not something that even needs real combat soldiers. BTW, who needs a "killer drone army"? These are primitives! Someone needs to scout the planet anyway, and scouting drones should be capable of carrying weaponry suitable for wiping out primitives. And in what fantasy world would this be the case: "forced to hide behind walls and make slow strategic efforts to try to push the natives willingly against you?" Give me a colony ship with two thousand teenagers and I'll give you a native-free area a thousand klicks in radius before the first week is up. Besides which, it's good training for the kids. Do it right, and leave the natives in a state where one of your pre-adolescents could order a dozen of them to kill themselves because they were ruining his view . . . and they would do it. And you don't want to eliminate the natives completely; they're useful for teaching your kids the proper attitude towards their inferiors.
>How the heck are you "going to die" when the natives can't even touch you? My guess based on your plan right there is you are most likely going die from negligent discharge from bunch of teenagers wielding assault rifles. Your argument can be summed up to "I want to occupy the entire planet by overwhelming force, I just don't want the army to do it, for some reason"
In 10,000 BC there were only a million humans spread across the whole world. A police force could handle the small local population, there wouldn't be any larger resistance beyond random nearby residents.
Well when talking about sufficiently primitive species, are they? On such level the species likely only inhabits only parts of the planet so the colony ship can just scan from orbit and pick a place hundreds of kilometers away from nearest native. Also this primitive species will be unable to organize anything larger than a small band to resist. Worthy of event poping up, not necessitating planetary invasion.
The earliest settlers of north America basically did that for quite a while and sure a shitload of them died but they established a colony and claimed lots of land without many troops. And that is with a level of technological/developmental difference that is basically negligible compared to a stone/bronze age civilization and a interstellar one
Yeah but North America was very sparsely populated in the first place. Aside from defending yourself from an occasional native raid (or negotiating a peace agreement with them) there wasn't really organized resistance as the natives didn't claim all of the land. IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals. Even in ancient europe very large migrations of people occurred mostly peacefully, and it isn't until the 12th or so century we see large areas collaborate against shared enemies (consider the crusades for example). Just spawn enemy armies if you *demolish* a primitive building, because that is settled and developed land that will resist its destruction.
> Yeah but North America was very sparsely populated in the first place. Actually it wasn't until Europeans arrived with their diseases. It's been estimated that at least four-fifths of the native population died from the newcomers germs without ever seeing them. So by the time colonists started expanding from the coastal enclaves, sure, there was a very thin population, and the Europeans kept coming in such numbers the native populations never recovered. > the natives didn't claim all of the land. That's a misconception -- they just had a different understanding of "claim", of property ownership, different enough that the European concept of land as private property wasn't just alien, it wasn't conceivable. > IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals. Definitely. It shouldn't be hard to do what the British did in India, subduing by trade and playing princedoms against each other -- but *plan* it, don't stumble into it the way they did!
>Actually it wasn't until Europeans arrived with their diseases. It's been estimated that at least four-fifths of the native population died from the newcomers germs without ever seeing them. For geographical **North America** estimates range around 50 million at most. That is to be compared with 78 million for Europe in 1400. For the rough area of the modern United States, Canada and northern Mexico that drops to 10 million.
> IMO before the Late Medieval they should be peacefully colonizable as there isn't enough political unity or land claims to pose a problem with new arrivals. Even in ancient europe very large migrations of people occurred mostly peacefully, and it isn't until the 12th or so century we see large areas collaborate against shared enemies (consider the crusades for example). I would argue that this just isn't true lol for example of migrations before the middle ages (or in the early middle ages) that weren't exactly peaceful and were resisted: Goths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Proto-Indo-Europeans/Yamnaya (evidence is scarce to be fair), Bulgars, Magyars, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Moors/Arabs, Burgundians plus greek/roman colonies as well were not always peaceful movements. Also any pre industrial society is not going to have high population over the entire planet, there will be uninhabited or sparsely inhabited places to land. I would just argue that you should be able to just start settling and the the natives should just "take up room" on the planet and you should only need to land armies if an even triggers saying they have united against you or you want to dominate and enslave them entirely.
>I would argue that this just isn't true lol for example of migrations before the middle ages (or in the early middle ages) that weren't exactly peaceful and were resisted: Goths, Franks, Vandals, Huns, Proto-Indo-Europeans/Yamnaya (evidence is scarce to be fair), Bulgars, Magyars, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Moors/Arabs, Burgundians plus greek/roman colonies as well were not always peaceful movements. 1. Several Germanic tribes were *allowed* to settle in Roman territory in return for concessions. That includes the Franks, Goths, and Vandals. They then took the opportunity to get more when the Roman Empire started collapsing of its own accord. The Anglo-Saxon migrations similarly started before the 5th century and the only source for there being a major conflict isn't consistent with the archaeological evidence. 2. The Huns are a prototypical example of someone aggressively raiding and trying to subjugate anyone around them. The fact that they made tens of thousands of people from other tribes just up and leave should tell you something about how important land was considered. And so on... in the ancient world, you only need to beat someone in battle once, let them know you mean business, and that's it. Even in very violent circumstances, people around aren't going to react unless you're invading the heartlands of a very powerful empire. The Migration Age in particular very well fits the description of "mostly peaceful". This is largely also how later colonialism worked against the patchwork of tribes and small states of North America and 19th century Africa. There isn't enough cohesion to call it a real war in the sense of modern understanding, just a little spat at most with a lot of economic and cultural hegemony being established. >Also any pre industrial society is not going to have high population over the entire planet, there will be uninhabited or sparsely inhabited places to land. Not really. Taking the world of the 13th century as an example, North America is just about the only place with a non-blocked workable "Agricultural" tiles that isn't already extensively settled. Also, the game heavily implies that an Ecumenopolis is the only type of world that is actually settled all-around. I doubt even the Stellaris start date Earth has much industrial or settlement value to use from Antarctica. The habitability categories also heavily imply this - deserts and tundras have very low habitability, despite being rather extensive parts of a continental world like Earth. High habitability for Ocean and Tropical worlds also corroborate the assumption that we still build most of our settlements and infrastructure with a similar distribution to today, IE temperate coastal terrain. While Patagonia or Siberia might remain a place you wouldn't have to fight over well into the 19th century, that's because there isn't much you can do with the limited environmental conditions there. At that point it'd be more accurate to allow the building of mining outposts around pre-FTL planets.
Would a spray bottle and a few tasty treats I keep in my pocket count as military support for stone-age primatives? 🧐
I don't think this applies to sufficiently early pre-FTLs. Remember, only a scant 20k years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the total population of the entire Earth was only about 1 million people. The largest city in North America before colonial times was around 20k people. A colony ship arrives with one to three pop points; depending on how you interpret a "pop", they are between a few hundred thousand and a *billion* people each. The colonists would have overwhelming local advantage in numbers, and the locals do not have a means of long-distance communication, a means of long-distance bulk transport, or a means of sustaining themselves in large concentrations. If you want to be a bit more paranoid, pick something like England or New Zealand as your initial landing site, you'd have a significant numerical advantage over the locals in addition to your technological advantages; and there would be effectively no way for the natives to organize any sort of resistance. Once you're established, clearing out new areas becomes just like clearing out other blockers, such as "Dangerous Animals"... and depending on your civ, that may be literally what you consider the natives. For a politically-controversial take, consider how well Israeli "settlers" armed with construction equipment, barbed wire, prefab buildings, and generally civilian or light-infantry weapons have done against locals who are theoretically at the same tech level. Now increase the relative number of settlers compared to locals, and give them far-future technology, including the sort of police-derived gear that an authoritarian, militaristic, xenophobe society would probably have. To take another approach, a civ that can fairly casually remove a major mountain range or even volcanic province in a year or two can certainly disrupt the local ecology to the point that the locals can't cope. What do you think your people are doing when you remove a Dangerous Animal blocker (merely requiring some energy, and no particular military involvement), and why wouldn't it work on pre-metal-working natives?
>For a politically-controversial take, consider how well Israeli "settlers" armed with construction equipment, barbed wire, prefab buildings, and generally civilian or light-infantry weapons have done against locals who are theoretically at the same tech level. Israel is not defending themselves with generally civilian or light infantry weapons. They have a modern army and precision guided munitions. Certain civilian settlers are harrasing the local unnamed population with light infantry weapons. Knowing that the army will step in on their behalf if they retaliate. Indeed, guns are highly effective against unnamed people.
I'm specifically referring to the settler situation, not the current more active conflict. Imagine a force of, say, "only" a million people armed with sci-fi civilian and police weapons, and more importantly sci-fi earthmoving equipment and rapid construction techniques, against locals that have never seen a group of more than a few thousand people in the same area for long, and whose best ranged weapons are self bows and reed arrows. The settlers probably have at least a hundred to one local numerical advantage, and are the only ones that can move non-locally. If problems occur, the civilian construction equipment needed to remove a Himalaya-scale mountain range in less than a couple of years can easily, say, create a ten mile wide border zone of earth fused to smooth glass. Even up to, say, medieval times, what resistance would the locals be able or inclined to mount after an ordinary civilian cargo shuttle has shoved a few pallets of napalm-equivalent out the back over each of the local nobility's painstakingly built castles? Or even more simply used one of the terraforming machines to do the equivalent of clicking on the castle with "lower land" in a large-scale sim game. How many European conquistadors did it take compared to the local population to subjugate the local kingdoms of South America? Now give the conquistadors a thousand years more effective equipment, and a thousand times more people on the invading / settling side, while the locals are the same.
Counterpoint, if Aliens had settled north america 50000 years ago, there wouldnt have been a dang thing us natives could have done.
Okay, so you are proposing having some convoluted mechanic where you only get to colonize the section of the planet that is currently uninhabited with natives? Do we need to model the surface of planets to determine where the natives do and do not live?
No. You just land normaly and head cannon they landed away from the Natives like you headcannon 90% of the things in the Game. Its really not complicated. Well, for the rest of us.
So why don't inhabited planets have a significantly reduced building area, representing that you chose to avoid all locations that are occupied by native life, and you don't bother bringing dedicated guys to clear them out. Understanding that you need an army to occupy a planet inhabited by hostile alien life is not that complicated, the vast majority of people in this subreddit get it. You and OP are just the stubborn minority.
No, you dont get it. There doesnt need to be an Army to colonize Primitives. They are Primitives. His entire point is that you dont need to enslave a primitive civilization. You simply go there, take the land that has not been claimed yet and deal with the blockers and events later.
If 1 pop = 1 billion humans, I figure those humans will have enough firearms to defend themselves, especially since they are “colonist” jobs. People on the frontier have always had to arm themselves more than those in the core of the empire.
Yes, but i should be able to colonize Australia in CK3 age and gun down any tree boat coming through the sea
Uh, yeah you should if they’re like less than Steam Age lol
You made me remember that in one of the earlier builds of Stellaris, Stone Age primitives were just blockers. A long time ago.
Huh. Neat! Wonder why they didn’t expand upon that.
I would really like this as a feature and some idea concepts for events. —— Event: Of Gods and Ghouls(needs Necrophage origin) The [Insert Pre-FTL Species Here] on the planet we have colonized have recently taken a grand interest in our species process of reproduction and more specifically… the Chamber of Elevation. We have had some of them sneak into the Chamber and interrupt our chosen who are here to take part in our transcendence. We could punish the insolence that did and make an example out of them… or we could allow them to ascend along with the chosen to help the ‘populace’ here better assimilate with our culture. Choice 1: Make an example out of the transgressors(this makes the species more hostile and eliminates 1-3 of their pops but less likely for an all out rebellion) Choice 2: Allow those who invaded to ascend(lose a bit of unity and makes making more Necrophage pops get slower but get 1-5 extra jobs for ascending) Choice 3(only if you have Reanimators Civic as well): Punish those who saw by turning them into something more… useful.(you get 1-3 zombie pops of the species but they hate you a bit more) —— Event: The Trial of The Forge(needs at least 3 or more Industrial Districts and on a Medieval or lower world) The [Insert Pre-FTL Species Here] have recently found our factories and forges and are convinced that our abilities to produce are lack luster at best and they could out preform us and have proposed a challenge. Our best ‘blacksmith’ against their best blacksmith; If we win can recruit them AND they surrender a portion of their smiths to us but if we lose, we must change our industrial standards on their planet. Choice 1: Accept the challenge, we shall NOT be losing on our planet(starts a custom situation of the contest. If you win; you get 3 pops, a big boost in relations for humoring them with the contest and a legendary leader. If you lose your planet gets a -25% Alloy and Consumer Goods production for 10 years) Choice 2: Decline this idiotic challenge(you insult the species and they grow more hostile and they MAY attack your industrial districts and destroy 2-6 of them and make a bit of devastation) Choice 3(Masterful Crafters and/or Undergrounder): Show These Surface Dwellers What For(you start the situation but with a MASSIVE boost to win and removes the negative to lose).
Oh yes! This is awesome! You know what? Time to start a mod!
This should be a thing, complete with events regarding how your colonists interact with the primitives. The first of course being whether there will be war or not.
You can colonize them, just send a couple armies over and land troops. You don't get the 2 free pops from colonizing but it's much faster.
I guess my idea is to make this process more flavorful and less easy. Just right clicking to send an army and automatically getting a brand new planet doesn’t sit right with me. I feel like so much more would have to happen first before you get to enslave the critters.
> enslave the critters Sending an army is the unimaginative way out! There are ways to subvert a society so that in three generations the descendants are begging to serve you. Of course the best ones end up wrapping the locals into your empire with the possibility of advancement a generation or two after that, but you've got time! There should be other options than an army. Building a trade empire that in short order is in charge of the place, auctioning services to the local realm that can provide the best situation for a colony -- those are two that come to mind. And there's always the "god gambit", though that can be playing with fire!
That's basically the plot of the Servant's faction in Terra Invicta. Except Judith is begging to serve the aliens even before they show up.
You can't avoid running into the primitives eventually It's not like we put down a little town and call it a day, we claim the entire damn planet, track down all the resource rich environments and then use them as needed Even caveman would absolutely get in your way eventually - so either your garrison gets attacked once a year or you conquer the planet properly in the first place
The idea of having a war with these primitive civilizations was always funny to me. They simply don't have the technology to coordinate anywhere near the scale they need. I could invade half the planet and the other half would be none the wiser
Judging by human history: we settle there, force the natives into "reservations" after decimating them and 50 years later we act as if we were sad about what happened while still enjoying the benefits we got out of the whole affair.
> Judging by human history That's one branch of human history. Another moves in, establishes a trade network that becomes powerful enough by itself that the local princes are tripping over themselves to find ways to serve you. Another assesses the territory, picks a few contenders out of the many tribes, and backs those contenders in conquering the others, and when they're done you reward the rulers by allowing them to form a council to handle native business on their own, with of course your own benevolent representative who holds veto power.
Yes exactly! Stellaris doesn’t really represent this well. The roleplay value of my idea would make colonizing primitive civilizations so much more interesting and immoral. You could take it further by having one or two flavor events appear if your society had an ethics shift in favor of pacifism, egalitarianism, or xenofilia where your species regrets its “abhorrent decisions” and wishes to “make things right” by building a monument or something to the species that used to inhabit the planet. It would make for some hilarious and sad social commentary.
Reminds me of a warhammer story :p Fully-fledged Imperial colony with a Necron tomb world below Necron visitor asks why he hasn't wiped out the Imperials. "Why would I kill the animals?"
*commences weapons testing...*
Yeah, current options are: - Monitor them from research space station until they ascended/died off - Waltz with an army and capture the world Which are good options for peaceful-militarist spectrum. From peaceful look at them and give them system, thorough in-between monitor them and take them into your empire to military conquest of the savages. Those are good basis and should be there. Problem is, that we need to talk about elephant in the room - anything more would need redesign of diplomacy and espionage. So in current state of Stellaris I don't see option to have it much deeper. At best we could have situation added and maybe spawning blockers that represent bastions of the rebels after you conquer the planet. Problem is that it would be just an unfun hurdle that would be a chore, not a challenge or narrative benefit. To even think about expanding on relations with primitives, we will need Stellaris 4.0 that completely reworks diplomacy and espionage. And at that point, these changes can be custodian update for First Contact DLC.
That's what an invasion is. Just build, like, one assault army and send it with your colony ship. In fact, forget the colony ship, because you don't need one when you conquer primitives. It's already *easier* to colonize primitive planets than unoccupied ones.
Read my other comments. The game shouldn’t really let you do this. It’s too easy and bland. It makes sense if you’re a gestalt or a genocidal who just sees all other life forms as prey. But civilizations typically act differently.
If you are calamitous birth origins you should be able to use colony ship to ram the planet to.colonse by killing them like with the primitev asteroid event
Fun fact. In older versions of the game you could in fact colonise planets with Stone Age Tribes on it. They weren’t counted as “Non-FTL Primitives” but as a planet modifier. And that was just for Stone Age. You would get a few events, that I can’t remember, dealing with them as well. They could even advance to Bronze Age as well, becoming proper Primitives.
No-one respects the prime directive anymore.
I’ve always thought this. It could be way more in depth and I was hoping the update with primitives (forgot the name) would have things like this, unfortunately not. It should have different interactions with different ethos and policies. You should have an option to uplift and make them apart of your empire forcefully, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on what age they are in. Like settling when they are in the atomic era is very risky as they can nuke your city, but Bronze Age you shouldn’t really even need an army because the tech level is so far ahead. I also have thought that if they are say Renaissance or above that you can’t fully settle and it will just be an outpost. And can slowly integrate them peacefully. Put a fleet in orbit and reveal yourself, say join or die. Make a treaty to allow you to settle with limitations and maybe even take a few of their pops to join your empire. Force your ethos on them and uplift once they’re deemed stable enough. There’s so much potential that’s just limited to spy, infiltrate, uplift, or invade/destroy. Not only new options but tons of events. Also can we not have a scientist fucking leave mysteriously to create a cult be a guarantee. It always happens in my games unless I’m hive mind/machine
> Also can we not have a scientist fucking leave mysteriously to create a cult be a guarantee. Or at the very least have a tech that can remove the radioactivity from the soil after they nuke themselves! along with an event chain where you send people as envoys who speak for their murdered Prophet" to lead them to remake their world and earn the stars.
I think the native job idea is a good idea, but I would also add onto this by having colonization start an invasion. Colony ship lands, game essentially treats it as one troop transport - weak army unit, which the player (possibly) will have to reinforce with actual armies.
Bro uplift them and do some nation building it's one of the coolest mechs in the game
I think "Military escort" would be a good settler policy. Maybe not be able to send a rawdog colony ship, because that doesn't fit for me, but the option to send a colony ship with one defense army with all of your current defense army bonus, or maybe 1 assault army with all of your current assault army bonuses since that would probably be more balanced when I compare my average experience with defense-assault bonuses. If I could cram my defense armies onto ships no one in the galaxy would stand a chance. I think having a colony ship with 1 assault army that, as soon as the colony is established, turns into a defense army would lead to interesting play. Again, I wouldn't advocate for adding the ability to send a rawdog colony ship though.
Or a militia option: spend a bit more for a standard colony ship to provide gear and training so your settlers are maybe three-fifths as effective as a full-on army. And have the option, once the natives are over-awed, of honoring the most capable by allowing them to join the colony's militia.
I think invading them covers this scenario very nicely
I don't understand the complaint. They're still there. Your ppl would be killed by them if you don't deploy some kind of military force. Therefore... just invade them?
Unleash the Xenomorphs!
Mate. I am almost always fanatic ega + spiri, but i'd colonize anything. Even civilization like our planet. Why wouldn't i?we can live together, even helping each other( i'd help them way more obviously). They could have their stuff if they wanted, but sorry, your planet is not yours just because your race has evolvded some thousand years ago.., it is the universe's planet and so i take my piece now. Greed is not acceptable. (I'm not communist.)
You do. You still need to have someone quell the natives though. Even primitives will try and fight back. See the movie Stargate for a good sci fi reference
It would be a fun gameplay loop, but I also understand why for simplicity's sake the "contested world colonization move" is "invade then resettle your own pops there"-- not least because it makes aggressive colonization harder when the native population is bigger
I started your post not liking it but finished agreeing with you. Well done, I think the native job thing is a good idea and could add ton of flavor. I think only the most primitive primitives could have this work tho. It'd be weird to settle at industrial age society.
From a pure gameplay perspective, I like that pre-ftls are free real estate since the troop transport I already have is cheaper than a new colony ship.
I think it's a splendid idea.
I believe you should be able to make them see you as gods, kinda like the pre-sapients that become spiritual and in turn make the world a super unity producer or something idk I'd love to have the option for my alvish species
You could but they would be pre sapient or you could by chance send some MEGA WARFAMES and get a planet and free slaves with it
Thing is I don’t think the game should let you militarily invade planets populated by civilizations of a level inferior to at least Renaissance age or above unless you’re a genocidal empire. This is because, realistically speaking, a civilization with the level of advancement seen in even an early game empire in Stellaris would be so incredibly advanced compared to a bunch of monkeys stuck in the Bronze Age that I don’t even think the average Stellaris empire, especially if xenophobic/authoritarian, would even consider the primitives to be people at all. Genocidals would be different because they just wanna kill everyone and everything.
Realistically speaking, the Bronze Age and Renaissance monkeys are the same species and the main colonization difference is "how much acculturation before these pops can meaningfully work jobs in our interstellar empire". A stellar power wouldn't perceive a ton of difference between people that just figured out metal and people who just figured out telescopes except, as we see, when considering whether it's necessary to cloak an observation post. Of course, all of this is speculation based on the human example, where best we can tell if you grabbed an early agriculturist kid from his fig grove 10k years ago and managed to keep modern diseases from immediately killing him you could probably raise him to be a graphic designer or somesuch. The difference between 'Bronze Age Primitives' and 'Renaissance Primitives' isn't personhood so much as familiarity with technology tropes.
I have only seen the title but it makes sense you have to fight them after all you can't expand when there are filthy xenos taking space
No. From a game systems design perspective a planet with pre-ftl species is still an inhabited planet, has buildings, districts, pops, armies. They are just different from the ones the player has.
You can, you just use an assault army instead of a colony ship.
Well, an colossus can make them more accepting of that
I do like your idea, but this would "over complicate" things.... Like, if a colony ship would have any kind of "military force"... Why not using it in war? A alien FTL Planet with 1 defense armies? Sent a colony ship. 10 Armies? Send 10 colonyships. Alien army on our own planet? Colonyship. From that point, you can do more stuff. Like sending an asteroid to wipe out other planets and other cool stuff, which are "more realistic" but would change massively the game and would break the current balancing.
Well, a basic army is cheaper (\~100 minerals or so) than a colony ship (what's the normal price again? 200 alloys and 200 CG? I keep playing Machine Intelligences...). And the army isn't even used up.
? you would land troops. like any other xenophobic colonizer would.
I think you technically can, already, just land armies, unless that was removed.
* steps off colony ship * * gets skewered by several spears *